Useful Tools

Are the tools you have in place truly useful to allow you to love yourself unconditionally and thus love all beings? The key word here is all, not just the ones you deem useful…

For many years I did things that I considered useful, but after forty nine years I found myself at such a low point that I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to rise up. There was no I think I can chants, no positive thinking, no meditation, no loving myself. There was much confusion and despair, and the insanity of this is my own mind that developed these tools and deemed them useful. Now I know not many get to this place of total despair so it’s difficult to understood how low I was, but I will say this, I’m fortunate beyond words and I will tell you why. When I was twenty eight years old there were ten of us still hanging in a bar in Newark, all of us using the tool of alcohol and drugs as useful tools. Out of those ten individuals eight of them are dead. What’s tragic about this is the tools that each of them accepted as useful to live life were the cause of their deaths. Think about how insane this is and how often this is repeated today; insanity to say the least.

When I look back at what I thought were useful tools, I see nothing but this insanity. I alone although not intentional caused all my own suffering. Now you may not think this applies to you, but every negative thought one ever has comes from within. It may have been put there by some outer influence, but it was attached to by you and seen as useful. I’m not a big negative/positive person, my experience has been more in line with quietness as the most useful tool to live by, but it wasn’t always this way. To me the question to ask yourself if you can muster the courage to do so is, are you willing to truly face yourself to see if the tools you have in place are truly useful to allow you to love yourself unconditionally and thus love all beings…